I think the rationale here is insufficient to justify a removal. > However, it appears that to the best of my knowledge all hardware > vendors of SmartLink chips, modems, or whitelabel ODMs are all > out of business at least as far back as 2005.
Lack of currently-produced hardware is not an argument for ceasing to support existing hardware which may still be in use. (This would not, for example, be a rationale for disabling any of the many drivers in the linux package for hardware that is no longer produced.) > sl-modem also does not pass the cat-video test - it is unlikely that even > if one has sl-modem working one can open Ubuntu and watch a cat > video online. I don't know what evidence you have to support this conclusion. > sl-modem-daemon only builds on i386, and has no amd64 userspace support. Yes, but the i386 package is still installable on amd64, so this doesn't seem to matter for users. > the kernel driver is not upstream and thus requires constant patching > by our kernel team to keep building. "constant patching": there has been exactly one round of patching by the kernel team to fix a build failure, in 2019. Note that this package was removed once before, but came back via Debian (bug #1650379). If there were pointers to concrete evidence that this is a maintenance burden for the kernel team, I would accept that as a removal rationale. ** Changed in: sl-modem (Ubuntu) Status: Triaged => Won't Fix -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1915878 Title: RM sl-modem hardware not available To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sl-modem/+bug/1915878/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs